Doctors nurses and paramedics do. They get coughed on and risk TB.
They get bled on and risk Hep C and aids. They blow their backs out moving the morbidly obese. They get threatened and assaulted by crazies drunks and addicts. Non of us signed up to deal with a completely avoidable plague that can bring death to our families.
I once packed the bleeding nose of an aids patient. Took me thirty minutes and when I was done my gown and face mask was covered from head to toe in a fine pink mist. When I finished he asked how long the packing needed to stay. I told him three days. He responded “ I’m taking it out, I work as a bar tender and I can’t go to work like this.” I told him if he did he could bleed to death somewhere else I wasn’t risking my life and my wife’s repacking his nose.
And what risks does Mr Lawyer take? Paper cuts? Eye strain?
When you have a MANLY job you can lecture us to man up.
Yeah, buddy, I am a mom. I risked my life giving birth, is that good enough for you? I also served in the military, although it was a cush job in the JAG. Nonetheless, if called to help in my field, I wouldn’t be a coward, you may depend upon that, my fine feathered friend. Now deal. Since you are a flight surgeon, do something.
Well, since the government and hospital administrators have determined that the doctors are the least important part of health care, and since they don’t think that their expertise is of any value in determining the best way to deliver health care, and since they believe that most of the physician’s duties can be handled by ‘physician extenders’ at much less cost, let them deal with this themselves.
Doctors all over the nation are calling for halts to flights from infected countries, but the government is not listening. Bureaucrats are saying there is ‘no risk’ of epidemic when doctors know better. The government is causing this problem, let the government deal with it.
I’ve said it before, hospitals and doctors are not going to be able to contain this because the government is not doing their job. This disease is going to spread in the airports and restaurants and walmarts and buses and grocery stores of America.
If the government expects me to risk my life because of their stupidity, they can think again. The government has insinuated itself between me and my patients to such an extent that I no longer feel I am treating patients when I go to work, but administrators and computers and numbers. They have worked very hard to rewrite the patient-doctor relationship, and unfortunately, they have succeeded in both directions. This doctor will not be in the Emergency Department when the SHTF.
Do I sound angry, you bet I am. It has been building ever since governments and administrators have been telling me more and more how to practice medicine and that I am not a good physician because my ‘door to greet’ time is not what they say it should be and because I am not seeing enough patients per hour because mandated, inadequate computer charting takes several times longer to complete.
I never planned on retiring this early, but every day I get closer and closer. I suspect this is going to push me and many other physicians over the edge.
O2